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What the iPhone X borrowed from the Palm Pre

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I have become the unofficial standard bearer for webOS, the operating system created by Palm for the Pre and its successive devices. It was a wildly innovative and smart foundation for a smartphone done in by performance problems, mediocre hardware, and most of all by US carriers who acted as kingmakers for other companies.

So as the bearer of a thoroughly-tattered banner, I’ve been hearing a lot of people ask what I thought about the iPhone X and how it borrows many of the ideas first introduced by Palm. Here’s what I think: it’s great, and also it’s silly compare the state of tech in 2017 with the state of tech in 2009. Just because Palm did some stuff first doesn’t take away from Apple is doing them now. Context matters, and our context today is very different.

The iPhone X has a lot of new interface ideas. Very few of them 100 percent original. Take FaceID, for example. Both Google with the Galaxy Nexus and Samsung with many other devices have been making unlocking your phone with your face possible — but all of them have been pretty bad compared to what I experienced with the iPhone X.

That’s not a Palm example, but it’s instructive: ideas float around and sometimes Apple does a better job of implementing them than others who did it first. Is that the case with the innovations Palm introduced with webOS, then? Yeah, pretty much, because technology marches on. But webOS did some things that nobody has copied yet, too — although I think it’s well past time to stop pining for those unique features. Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/15/16300402/iphone-x-webos-palm-pre-cards-gestures-nostalgia